The 94-feet-long, 21,000-pound fiberglass blue whale that looms over the American Museum of Natural History’s Milstein Hall of Ocean life underwent its annual cleaning on Tuesday.

Crowds of visitors watched as Trenton Duerksen, perched almost 50 feet in the air on an aerial work platform, gently vacuumed a year’s worth of dust from the massive model.

The 94-foot-long blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History got its yearly cleaning on Tuesday, April 24. Photo Credit: Newsday / Alejandra Villa

“I think the first five minutes of being back on the lift is probably the most exhilarating and scary,” Duerksen, an exhibition maintenance manager, told amNewYork during a break. “You get about 20 feet up and everything is fine up until that point. Then you get used to it after a few minutes.”

The whale, which is modeled from a female blue whale found in 1925, debuted in 1969.

More than 30 years later, it was renovated to make its features more accurate, said Dean Markosian, director of the Museum’s Department of Exhibition.

“The blowhole was modified, some work was done on the eyes and they added a belly button,” Markosian said. “The original model was based on limited information and a whale that was dead.”